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The Supreme Court recently decided that the death penalty as it applies to persons with mental retardation is not a violation of constitutional protection from cruel and unusual punishment as long as juries consider the convicted person's disabilities during trial proceedings. Advocates for persons with mental retardation have argued that because their disability reduces culpability in capital offenses, the death penalty is always inappropriate. In this paper we argued that the latter position makes unwarranted categorical assumptions about mental retardation, fails to consider the individualized and situation-specific determinants of culpability for a capital offense, and undermines the very assumptions required to restore respect and value for citizens with mental retardation as participants in society.

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This study compared the effects of training conditions, abilities, strategies, and a combination of abilities and strategies on the recall and comprehension of prose passages. The subjects were 45 educable mentally retarded children divided equally into the three conditions. Although there was significant pre- to post-test improvement within each condition for factual recall, no differences were observed among the conditions for either factual recall or comprehension.

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Cognitive style and its interaction with training effects in promoting the acquisition and far generalization of a visual analogies strategy by 22 male and 17 female EMR pupils was evaluated. Training was effective in producing acquisition and far generalization; cognitive style was not. We suggested that the lack of interaction between cognitive style and training was due to the fact that the training program modified the subjects' cognitive style, i.e., impulsives tended to perform more like reflectives.

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The effectiveness of a training program, varying in presentation format (single vs. multiple task), in promoting the acquisition and generalization of a verbal abstraction strategy was evaluated for 38 female and 42 male EMR learners. Although the training program enhanced the acquisition and near generalization of the verbal abstraction strategy, no far generalization was observed. Presentation format had no effect on acquisition nor on near or far generalization. The results were interpreted in terms of prior findings, and an alternate definition of generalization was offered.

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The effectiveness of strategy-training programs that differed in the degree of subject self-management required on the verbal abstraction performance of 37 female and 43 male EMR children and adolescents was compared. In terms of acquisition, all three training conditions, irrespective of the degree of self-management required, were superior to the control condition. At maintenance, the two self-managing conditions (self-instruction and modeling) were superior both to more traditional instructor-controlled training (relevant attributes) and the control condition. All three training conditions were more effective in promoting generalization when compared to the control condition.

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The ability of 47 EMR and 51 nonretarded individuals to maintain and generalize a sorting and retrieval strategy designed to facilitate recall and clustering was examined. Each of these two groups of subjects was assigned to one of three conditions: experimental, practice, or control. Only subjects in the experimental condition received strategy training. The three conditions were each further divided into two subconditions: superordinate and associative. The experimental task consisted of two phases: word elicitation and recall. The data showed that after a 6-month interval, the strategy was still maintained. Neither the far-generalization data that was provided by the word-elicitation phase nor the near-generalization data, obtained through the recall phase, however, revealed any significant results.

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Accuracy of digit span estimation by EMR subjects at two different MA levels, 8 and 11, was assessed. The effects of explicit strategy training, generalized instruction, and no training on recall performance and apportionment of study time were compared. The older group was more realistic in their digit span estimation than was the younger group. Explicit strategy training facilitated digit recall and evoked longer study times than did the other conditions.

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The ability of 60 EMR and 60 nonretarded children to acquire and retain a sorting and retrieval strategy designed to be facilitative of recall and clustering was examined. All subjects were given a baseline task and, based on their performance, were assigned to one of three groups: experimental, practice, and control. The experimental group received a multi-session training procedure that consisted of instructing the subjects to arrange the stimuli in conceptual arrays, to name individual stimuli and the superordinates to which the stimuli belong, and to count the number of stimuli in each superordinate. The practice group was presented with the same stimuli but received no training. The control group received only the baseline and criterion measures. Analyses of data showed superior performance by the experimental group on measures of short- and long-term recall, clustering, and sorting.

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A series of 5-item oddity tasks was administered to 44 EMR adolescents to determine whether a consistent strategy was used to achieve problem solutions. Such a strategy requires establishing a relational hypothesis for two items in a set and retaining that hypothesis in memory while testing subsequent items against it. Evidence for use of a consistent strategy would be found in a particular pattern of response latencies and errors dependent upon the position of the odd stimulus in each 5-item set. Analysis of variance of the mean latency scores and errors for the five positions in which the odd item occurred suggested that a consistent strategy was being applied.

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PA learning was investigated among sixty educable mentally retarded adolescents as a function of variations in image-evoking potential of the response members and of instructions to utilise a verbal mediation strategy. The data indicated that performance with verbal mediation instruction surpassed that under non-mediation instruction conditions regardless of imagery level. Results were discussed in terms of Paivio's conceptual peg hypothesis as well as the EMR's deficiency in input organisation.

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A 20-questions problem-solving task was given to 116 EMR adolescents and 65 nonretarded MA-equated fourth graders. The subjects' questions were classified as either constraint seeking or nonconstraint seeking, and the problem-solving strategies were evaluated in terms of their efficiency of solution. Results indicated that the nonretarded group asked more constraint-seeking questions, and their strategies reflected more efficient problem-solving solutions. The majority of subjects in both groups appeared to be in Mosher and Hornsby's (1966) suggested transitional stage, as demonstrated by the fact that their strategies fell between employing only questions that eliminated one item in the stimulus array (hypothesis scanning) and questions that consistently eliminated the maximum number of items (perfect focusing). In addition, nonretarded subjects' strategies reflected a greater awareness of the apparent organizational demands of the task and especially an awareness of the entire range of dimensions in the stimulus array.

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Twelve cognitive process variables were investigated as predictors of reading and arithmetic achievement and studied for internal structure, with 115 EMR adolescent subjects. Stepwise regression and factor analyses were employed to study prediction and structure, respectively. Memory variables were the most important predictors of reading. They were also involved in arithmetic but to a lesser extent. The data suggested that the ability to generate and utilize strategies facilitating the recall of unstructured material as well as the capacity to be sensitive to strategy-relevant structure embedded in stimuli were important prerequisites for the acquisition of reading skills. An oddity task, measuring the ability to maintain the same relational focus for successive applications to new stimulus material, was found to be most pertinent for predicting arithmetic computational skills.

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The ability of EMR children to acquire and retain a mediational strategy for PA learning was demonstrated by a training procedure which consisted of the sequencing of consecutive lists under varying degrees of mediational facilitation. The components of the training procedure included training interval, overt verbalization, and verbal context combined with imagery instruction. Forty-five EMR children (mean CA = 11.26; mean IQ = 63.33) were randomly assigned to one of three groups: mediation, standard, and control. Analyses of data showed significantly superior performance of the mediation group in acquisition and retention of the mediational strategy. The pedagogical implications of the study were discussed.

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